You say E-book, I say eBook. The technology might be approaching maturity, but the language we use to describe it refuses to settle down. Surely the only acceptable spelling is ebook. As in email. But still people stubbornly cling on to hyphens and random capital letters, with an infuriating lack of consistency.

The Bookseller merrily skips from ebook to eBook to e-book. The Times, normally so punctilious, has hyphenated and not in the same article. An ad for Vanity Fair's new digital publishing arm reads: "Download Vanity Fair eBooks now, available where e-books are sold."

The OED compounds the confusion, listing no fewer than four varieties. In fact, it's so behind the times, the first definition it gives for ebook is "A hand-held electronic device on which the text of a book can be read."

Still, this is trifling compared with a more troubling phenomenon: the ubiquity of the word Kindle. Colloquially, it's already a generic term for e-reader, so widely used it threatens to become a verb, like "to hoover" or "to google". The main reason for this is the dominance of Amazon's machine. But it's not helped by our failure to come up with a catchy word for electronic reading devices. "E-reader" is horrible to say and even uglier written down. It's also nonsensical: we don't call MP3 players "e-listeners".

Amazon might not be the most likeable business, but it knows how to invent a winning product name. So did Barnes & Noble with Nook, but that's unlikely to cross the Atlantic soon. The anagrammatic Kobo is growing in popularity, though yet to enter common parlance.

But whoever wins the e-reader war, we have a patriotic and moral duty to stop brand names creeping into the English language. Americans will happily put a Band-Aid on a blister, blow their nose with a Kleenex, or go for a run in their Nikes. Over here, we've traditionally been more circumspect about this form of free advertising. Why stop now?

Maybe it's pointless worrying: the humble e-reading device may soon be supplanted by tablets such as the iPad and Kindle Fire. In the meantime, however, anyone worried about Amazon's grip on the book industry could do worse than find a snappy alternative to "e-reader".